collaboration

In this paper, we discuss our adaptation of a single-display, single-user commercial application for use in a multi-device, multi-user environment. We wrap Google Earth, a popular geospatial application, in a manner that allows for synchronized coordinated views among multiple instances running on different machines in the same co-located environment. The environment includes a touch-sensitive tabletop display, three vertical wall displays, and a TabletPC. A set of interaction techniques that allow a group to manage and exploit this collection of devices is presented.

A Collaborage is a collaborative collage of physically represented information on a surface that is connected with electronic information, such as a physical In/Out board connected to a people-locator database. The physical surface (board) contains items that are tracked by camera and computer vision technology. Events on the board trigger electronic services. This paper motivates this concept, presents three different applications, describes the system architecture and component technologies, and discusses several design issues.

Many computer operating systems provide seamless support for multiple display screens, but there are few cross-platform tools for collaborative use of multiple computers in a shared display environment. Mighty Mouse is a novel groupware tool built on the public domain VNC protocol. It is tailored specifically for face-to-face collaboration where multiple heterogeneous computers (usually laptops) are viewed simultaneously (usually via projectors) by people working together on a variety of applications under various operating systems. Mighty Mouse uses only the remote input capability of VNC, but enhances this with various features to support flexible movement between the various platforms, "floor control" to facilitate smooth collaboration, and customization features to accommodate different user, platform, and application preferences in a relatively seamless manner. The design rationale arises from specific observations about how people collaborate in meetings, which allows certain simplifying assumptions to be made in the implementation.

In this paper we propose a novel way of supporting occasional meetings that take place in unfamiliar public places, which promotes lightweight, visible and fluid collaboration. Our central idea is that the sharing and exchange of information occurs across public surfaces that users can easily access and interact with. To this end, we designed and implemented Dynamo, a communal multi-user interactive surface. The surface supports the cooperative sharing and exchange of a wide range of media that can be brought to the surface by users that are remote from their familiar organizational settings.